


Andy's Story (2)

by pallasite



Series: Behind the Gloves [17]
Category: Babylon 5, Babylon 5 & Related Fandoms
Genre: #Ihavenootherfamily, #אין לי משפחה אחרת, Backstory, Bigotry & Prejudice, Boarding School, Canon Compliant, Culture Shock, Fix-It, Gen, Parent-Child Relationship, Psi Corps, School, Slice of Life, Teenagers, Telepath War, Telepath culture, The Corps Was Right, The Psi Corps tag is mine, Worldbuilding, telepaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-24
Updated: 2017-03-24
Packaged: 2018-10-09 14:12:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10413966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite
Summary: Somehow, since arriving at school, he had absorbed the deeper meaning of the artwork, as if through telepathic osmosis. Family. The ripped paper represented violence, he now knew – out in the wider world, telepaths were attacked regularly by normals, often for no reason at all. The glue stood for healing – imperfect, messy – and the empty gloves honored telepaths who had been murdered, or killed in the line of duty protecting the Corps. All the remaining shapes in the figure were interconnected, overlapping – none could be removed without tearing the ones around it, or cutting the string, if not unraveling the entire project itself. And the red border, he knew – the red paint stood for blood.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> What is this series? Where are the acknowledgements, table of contents and universe timelines? See [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10184558/chapters/22620590).
> 
> The first part of Andy's story is [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10227857/chapters/22694822).
> 
> The third part of Andy's story is [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10610514/chapters/23462715).
> 
> The later chapters of Andy's story (during and after the Telepath War) have not yet been posted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _Deadly Relations_ , p. 7, explains that in the Psi Corps flagship in Geneva, children who haven't yet developed telepathy (but who come from telepath families) live apart from the telepath children who have already developed their abilities. Although all children are raised "collectively" in groups, the term "cadre" is only used for groups of children who are already telepathic. (The other children are said to live in a dorm called "The Basement" by other children.)
> 
> I don't see why this would be the same for all Corps schools - it makes more sense to me that in general, "cadre" would simply refer to all groups of children raised together, and the Geneva school would be an exception (as it is in other ways).
> 
> In this story, I present Andy's school (the Chicago school) as raising all telepath children together in cadres, whether they have developed telepathy yet or not.

November 2262. Chicago. Psi Corps school, Minor Academy.

            Andy arrived at his new school with only a small suitcase and the clothes on his back. He’d been told not to pack much – the Corps would provide everything he needed. So he arrived only with mementos of home – family photos and vids, pieces of his old life.

            The first changes were external. He was given a set of gold and umber long-sleeved school uniforms,[1] each with a psi insignia on the front. For outdoor wear, he received a matching windbreaker, coat, jogging pants and sneakers,[2] along with shiny black dress shoes for formal affairs.

            “You are thirteen, right?” asked Teacher Jovanović, a stern, older man with salt and pepper hair and gray, colorless eyes, but who nonetheless radiated with the same sort of presence Andy had felt around Tess, a subtle bending of the mental space around him.[3] He wore a shiny badge like Tess had.

            Andy nodded.

            “You are no longer a child, so you must dress modestly.”[4]

            He handed Andy a pair of thin black leather gloves, and Andy obediently put them on. It felt odd to wear gloves indoors.

            The teacher gestured. “They are special. Do you know why we wear them, Mr. Mora?”

            He didn’t know. They seemed like ordinary gloves, similar to those worn in winter, except these had only a thin silk lining.

            “Telepaths have worn gloves since the beginning of the Corps, even earlier – for one hundred and fifty years. Normals passed laws to distinguish us on sight,[5] laws that are still in effect today. That is also why we wear this insignia.” He gestured to the badge on his chest.

            Andy felt queasy. He’d be marked and separated for the rest of his life? That couldn’t be right. He had to have misunderstood.

            The older man didn’t seem angry about his fate, just matter-of-fact. “But we are not our ancestors,” he continued. “They may have resented it, but we do not. We adapt. We are proud. Gloves mark boundaries – between childhood and adulthood, between public and private, between the inner and the outer, clean and dirty.[6] Between us and them.”

            “Them,” Andy could tell, meant normals.

            “We always wear gloves in public.[7] And we do not touch one another without them… unless we’re married, of course.”[8]

            He led Andy to a separate room. When Andy emerged, clad in his new uniform, the teacher smiled proudly, and led him to a full-length mirror.

            The clothes were the right size, but they didn’t feel right. Andy didn’t know the boy staring back at him. He looked like the one in the public service announcement, except for the different style uniform, and without his hair slicked. He looked foreign.

            No one wore uniforms in his normal school. The only people who wore uniforms were soldiers in EarthForce. His dad had spent twenty years in the service.

 _Who am I in this place?_ he wondered. _Will I ever fit in here? Will I ever be able to go home?_

            The teacher adjusted Andy’s collar slightly, and nodded approvingly. “You look sharp now, don’t you think?”

            The boy in the mirror nodded back, uncertainly.

            “How does the saying go, Andy… when in Rome?”

            “Do as the Romans.”

            “Nonsense. You’re in the Corps.” The teacher grinned knowingly. “All telepaths are brothers and sisters, whether we live in Rome, or here, or on Mars. No matter where you live, the Corps is still your Mother and Father, and always will be.”

*****

            The new wardrobe wasn’t so bad in the winter, Andy decided, but he dreaded the summer. No one on campus wore short pants or sleeves. Even when swimming, he heard, students had to remain modestly covered, especially their hands.

            Andy was assigned to a dorm with students his age, a long, low, concrete building whose corridors were decorated with Psi Corps motivational posters, urging him to eat healthy foods, dress modestly, and study hard. His room was equally spartan – two simple beds sat against the far wall, each under a window that overlooked the campus quad. The bed on the right had been neatly made, and stood next to a desk covered with books, writing implements and digital devices. His desk, on the left wall, was empty, and the cubby over it contained only two books: a thin one called the Psi Corps Student Handbook, and a thicker one entitled the Minor Academy Course Reader, Volume 1.

            Andy thumbed through the books – the reader looked especially interesting, as it contained stories from history and literature – and then inspected the rest of the room. The small closet had been partitioned in two – even if Andy had wanted to bring all his clothes, there wouldn’t have been space. Two posters hung over his roommate’s bed: one of a Psi Cop, and another of a group of smiling telepath teens standing in front of a large Psi Corps insignia, under which was written:

COOPERATION

We are all stronger together!

Matri nostrae ac Patri semper fidelis![9]

            Andy made his bed, listening to the flap of the flags outside in the courtyard. He heard someone enter the room from behind.

            “Hey!” said a high voice. “You must be my new roommate! I’m Hideo.”

            Andy turned, and did a double-take – everyone he’d seen since he stepped off the transport had had that same “three-dimensional” presence, but this boy “looked” like the normals back in Andy’s school, even though he wore the same Psi Corps school uniform.

            “You’re not telepathic,” Andy said, and then realized how terrible that sounded.

            _That’s the best you could do for a hello?_ he chided himself. _You’re never going to have any friends._

            “I’m only thirteen!” the boy replied, bristling. “I am a telepath!”

            “Sorry. I’m new here.”

            “So what that I haven’t got it yet?[10] You going to be a snob about it?”

            “Sorry. I didn’t mean to be. I just thought everyone here was a telepath.”

            “I told you, I am a telepath! My parents are both telepaths!”[11]

            Andy felt like a jerk, but not for long, because soon the whole floor had come to meet him, boys and girls alike. The small dorm room wouldn’t hold everybody, so they went out into a lounge at the end of the hall, where the walls were covered in large art projects. The students surrounded him and bombarded him with questions, from the mundane to the very personal.

            “What’s your name?”

            “Where are you from?”

            “Is that the city, or the country?”

            “Are there other telepaths in your family?”

            “Do you like boys, or girls, or both or neither?”

            Andy turned to the red-haired, freckle-faced boy who had asked him that. “I like Narn,” he shot back, sarcastically.

            Everyone laughed. “You can’t like Narn!” said the freckle-faced kid. “They have no telepaths.[12] You have to like humans.”

            “No I don’t, the president of the Interstellar Alliance married a Minbari, didn’t he?”

            “Yeah but that’s just weird.”

            Andy noticed that there weren’t any adults in sight – the students were very independent, at least as a group. They reminded Andy of a school of fish in the way they fit together, a seamless, flowing entity with its own subtle internal structure. He was the new, shiny pebble in their tank, the novelty that everyone wanted to swim up and touch.

            “Were you all raised in the Corps?” he asked the group, sensing the answer.

            The sea of heads nodded. “The ten of us are from Cadre 1.”

            “And we’re Cadre 2.”

            “Three!” Hands went up gleefully. “You’re sitting next to the project we did last year.”

            Andy turned and saw the small plaque identifying the installment and its creators. Several girls ran over and pointed to the parts of it that they’d worked on, telling Andy what they were especially proud of.

            “What’s it supposed to be?” Art had never been Andy’s strong suit – all he could see was paint, paper, a network of string, gloves and abstract interconnected shapes, all together within a huge red border. Words were scattered throughout, handwritten onto the background, or hanging on small cards from the string – “mother,” “father,” “cadre,” “Corps,” “strength,” “sacrifice,” “family,” “no other.”

            “It represents family,” one of the girls said, like this was intuitively obvious. “Every cadre did a project. They’re in all the dorms, in the cafeteria, in the classrooms.”

            Andy shrugged. He didn’t see “family” in that pattern of shapes at all.

            “And you?” he asked. “You were all raised in the Corps?”

            ”Yes,” said a Black boy named Kit, who Andy could tell was very strong telepathically and someone all the other students looked up to. He explained that they had grown up in cadres, groups of about a dozen children who all ate, slept and even, when they were younger, bathed together under the care of nannies.

            “But now that we’re all in the Minor Academy,” Hideo told him, “we’ll finally get to leave campus, and see the city.” None had left school grounds since they’d arrived, most around the age of three.

            “You’ve never seen normals?!”

            “Some of the support staff here aren’t rated highly enough to be in the Corps,” offered Deepa, a girl with coffee skin and dark brown eyes, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. Her voice held a trace of pity. “But they’re not normals, they’re P1s and P2s. They were raised in the Corps, so they choose to wear gloves like we do. Only Mr. Kahn, the head gardener, was raised as a normal. He wears gloves here, of course, like all adults do in the Corps, but there’s a rumor he takes them off when he leaves campus.”

            The students giggled.

            “He’s sort of a normal,” Henry offered. “I mean, not a dangerous normal, obviously…”

            “He said that normals think of him as a telepath, and that’s why he prefers to be here.”

            “It’s safer to be in the Corps,” offered another boy, definitively, and all the other children nodded. “The outside world is a scary place.”

            Andy remembered Patrick. Some normals were dangerous, certainly, but the whole world? Most normals weren’t like that.

 

[1] Gregory Keyes, Deadly Relations, p. 41, 47

[2] _Id._ , p. 47

[3] Gregory Keyes, Final Reckoning, p. 212-213

[4] Telepaths get their gloves at twelve or thirteen (canon is unclear), and have to wear them in public from then on. Wearing gloves is a mark of adulthood, which comes with additional responsibility. See Deadly Relations, p. 37 (Bester and his cadre receiving their gloves), Final Reckoning, p. 68 (“In the Corps, you always wore gloves, except when you were alone – or intimate.”)

[5] Gregory Keyes, Dark Genesis, inference

[6] Being in public without gloves is equivalent to being naked. See Final Reckoning, p. 15 (“His face seemed to have more lines each time he looked at it, but all in all he looked pretty good for a man of eighty-two. Except for his hands, which jarred him every time. Pink, gloveless - naked. He flexed his right hand, the good one. When he was a teenager, he’d had nightmares now and then that he was out in public, without his gloves. Telepaths didn’t wear gloves anymore, so he couldn’t either, not without being noticed. It made him feel dirty.”)

[7] _A Race Through Dark Places_ (telepaths must wear a psi insignia badge and gloves when out in public).

[8] Deadly Relations, inference. See Final Reckoning, p. 68. Telepaths do, of course, sometimes have sex outside of marriage, though teachers would not teach children of this age that this was appropriate behavior. See Deadly Relations, p. 136. Bester and his girlfriend have a sexual relationship when they are both nineteen: "He went, a little after nine. Liaisons like this were ambiguous territory - essentially everyone knew that students went to each other's rooms, and ostensibly it was forbidden. As long as you were careful, as long as appearances were maintained, no one really cared. Like a good parent, the Corps knew that sometimes it was best to be a little blind in one eye.

"So sneaking in was just a ritual, though there were penalties for being caught. He might be forbidden to associate with Liz for a time; leave, always difficult to get, might be entirely restricted."

See also _A Race Through Dark Places_ ; Talia taking off her gloves in Susan Ivanova’s apartment signals intimacy (implied also to be sexual).

[9] “To our Mother and Father, always faithful” in Latin. Canon gives the Corps motto as “Maternis, Paternis,” except this isn’t grammatically correct in Latin. I do not know how this error came to be, but I decided to fix it.

[10] Deadly Relations, p. 7, 36. Most telepaths develop their abilities in their teens. Children of telepath parents attend Psi Corps schools, no matter when their abilities develop. In Geneva, they live in a separate dorm.

[11] See Deadly Relations, p. 215. (“Lyta nodded affirmatively. “My mother was the only woman in our line in the last four generations who wasn’t [in Cadre Prime]. She was only a P2, so she was in the Basement at first, but when she was still pretty young, Grandma arranged for some relatives to raise her outside Teeptown. She was monitored, of course, but never actively attached to the Corps.””) Children of two telepath parents almost certainly grow up to be telepaths, though a small percentage do not rate highly enough to join the Corps.

[12] Pilot _(The Gathering)_ and elsewhere


	2. Chapter 2

            Every day began with a gathering in the courtyard. The whole school came out: from the smallest children, attended by their nannies and barely old enough to stand, to the most senior among the teachers and staff. The school community gathered around the flagpole, rain or shine, and faced the twin banners of the Earth Alliance and the Corps, gloved hands to their hearts.

            The first part of the pledge was the same as Andy had always said in school. The Corps had added a few new lines to the end, since now, Andy and the others weren't only citizens of the Earth Alliance, but also in the Corps.

_“I pledge my body, heart, soul, and mind to the service of the Earth Alliance, and the people who dwell on her myriad spheres. I promise to keep the laws, to keep the faith, to keep my eyes on the truth. I pledge to serve my comrades, my school, and the Corps. The Corps teaches, guides, and provides. The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. We are the children of the Corps.”[1]_

            Andy stumbled through the second half of the pledge on the first day, confused, not knowing the new words or what they really meant, but as the days passed, he realized that if he was going to live in Rome, so to speak, he had to act like the Romans. He didn’t really like saying every morning that the Corps was his parents – he missed his real parents more and more – but he didn’t want to stick out and refuse to participate.

            The young children recited the pledge by rote, Andy noticed, while the adults gave the moment an almost religious significance. Andy wasn’t sure where he fit in. The only thing he could see was that, for this one brief moment every morning, all telepaths stood on equal footing with one another, regardless of age or status: all were “children” of the Corps, collectively – whatever that meant.

            The teachers read school-wide announcements, and everyone made their way to breakfast – the younger children at the nursery or with their cadres, and the older students in the cafeteria. Andy rarely saw the little ones again until the following morning, except during recreation time, playing in the courtyards of their cadre houses.

            Andy spent the rest of the day in classes, and then activities. Students had their choice of martial arts, fencing, or indoor rock climbing, while others took art and music. Only evenings were unstructured, giving Andy time to do his homework, watch vids, and write letters home. The structured, even regimented nature of life at school reminded Andy of his father’s stories from his days in EarthForce. Rooms had to pass inspection. Students all wore uniforms. Teachers talked about discipline. There were lots of rules: Students had to be in bed by nine at night. There was no smoking or drinking allowed on campus, or even chewing gum. Academy students could only wear official “standard issue” Corps clothing[2] on campus, and could not leave the premises without a day pass from the Corps.

            Everyone cared a great deal about modesty, especially about gloves.

            “Going outside without gloves would be like going out in public naked!” exclaimed Hideo, when Andy asked him about it. Andy remembered how the students had giggled at the thought of the groundskeeper leaving campus, bare-handed. He quickly learned that “outside” meant any space that wasn’t his dorm room, or the bathrooms, not merely outdoors. There were “public” spaces and “private” ones, and the one time Andy absentmindedly left the room without his gloves, lost in thought about an essay he had been writing, the stares from his classmates in the hallway immediately alerted him to his mistake. He’d run back inside, scared to come out again for hours.

            How was he ever going to fit in here?

            Andy wrote letters home every night, describing life at school, asking his parents to come visit. Family members could only visit on weekends or specially designated visiting days.

            “My roommate is nice, but a little too nosy,” he wrote. “If I don’t make my bed the right way, he makes it for me! I told him not to touch my stuff, but he insisted.”

            “Do the teachers care?” Andy had asked Hideo. “Will we get in trouble if the sheets aren’t tight enough?”

            Hideo shrugged. “I’m just showing you how I was taught,” he replied, crawling over the bed. “Back in the cadres, this is how we did it. You’re paying attention, right?”

            Andy nodded. He didn’t want to get in trouble with the teachers, but he didn’t understand why he had to make his bed in some special way. Did the Corps have its own way of doing everything? He’d already had to learn how to eat his meals with gloves on, and that was challenging enough. It wasn’t merely bad manners to eat with his fingers – wearing gloves made it nearly impossible.

            And to scratch his back was even worse!

            “I don’t get why you’re re-making my bed,” he told Hideo.

            “The Corps is Mother and Father, and we are all the children of the Corps,” his roommate replied, repeating the final lines of the pledge as he finished the bed. “That makes us brothers now.”

            “Brothers do this?” He and his sister Sasha had never made each other’s beds, back home.

            “The Corps teaches, guides, and provides,” Hideo answered, confidently. “You weren’t born in the Corps, so you need to be taught how we do things, and this is how the Corps taught me to do it. As your brother, it’s my duty to show you.” When he’d finished his task, he sat on the edge and slipped his gloves back on.

            “If you say so,” Andy replied.

            “The Corps gives us everything – food, clothes, dorms, a school. And when we get older, the Corps will give us all our jobs, and approve our marriages.[3] The Corps is Mother and Father. We honor our parents by hard work, discipline, tidiness, and respect.”

            Andy knew Hideo meant him no harm, but he felt out of place, and missed his real family more than ever.

*****

            Andy made time to watch television almost every night, despite his intense schedule of classes, homework and activities. Although Andy and the other students weren’t allowed to watch the normal news, they watched daily broadcasts produced by the Corps instead.

            _“Late last night, Psi Cops successfully thwarted a rogue attack on Psi Corps facilities in Chicago. There were no injuries. Ten suspects were taken into custody. Director York met with the Senate oversight committee this morning to discuss the increase in attacks. He urged restraint on all sides, and assured the Senate that no additional assistance is needed, that the Corps is capable of addressing the problem within existing capabilities.”_

            Attempted rogue attacks continued to be a frequent occurrence, but so far, the majority were unsuccessful, and no one at school was especially worried.

            “They’re never going to succeed, because they’re stupid,” said Kit. “That’s why they’re rogues.”[4]

            Everyone nodded.

            “The teachers say rogue telepaths are the enemy,” said Henry, “but I don’t think they really believe it.[5] They just have to say it. The rogues are our brothers and sisters, too, like they always say in the old vids. Rogues are confused, angry, lost. They blame the Corps for everything the mundanes have done to them.”

            Andy squirmed. “My family are normals,” he said. “Stop calling them that word, mundanes.”

            “Why?” Henry looked at Andy askance. “You know how dangerous they can be, and you know how much they hate us. Your classmate even tried to kill you, just because you’re a telepath!”

            Andy regretted telling his new friends about the Patrick incident. “Not all normals are like that! Most are good people!”

            Henry didn’t believe him, and just shook his head dismissively. _What does he know?_ Andy mused, darkly. _He’s never met a normal, he’s never left campus. All he knows is what the Corps’ been spoon-feeding him._

            But Andy wasn’t leaving campus any time soon, either, so television became his escape from homesickness. Andy’s classmates made certain he saw all the classic Corps vids, some close to a century old. The vids showed a wide variety of career paths in the Corps; there were doctors[6] and lawyers,[7] scientists[8] and teachers[9] while other telepaths worked in normal institutions, in businesses assisting with negotiations,[10] helping the police identify suspects to crimes,[11] or in hospitals helping with psychiatric diagnoses[12] and facilitating communication for those too sick to speak. Most respected of all were Psi Cops.[13]

            Telepaths, he learned, had a culture all their own, one defined partly by their unique history, and partly by their sensory experiences. Telepaths, he observed, commonly finished each other’s sentences and answered unspoken questions. “Blooping,” or letting one’s thoughts or feelings spill out in an uncontrolled manner, was frowned upon in adult company, as an improper, childish behavior. And just as normals would notice and react to a sudden noise or bright light, telepaths would also react to a “loud,” sudden change in the feelings and thoughts around them.

            Yet as much as Andy loved watching vids with his new friends and learning about their culture, letters from home remained the highlight of his life. Even the smallest news from home was worth more than anything in the universe.

            “Please come visit,” he begged in each letter. “I miss you all. Please come see me at school.” Even the memory of his mother’s fierce temper didn’t seem so bad.

            “They’ll come, you’ll see,” Andy told the others one night around the television. “They said they’d visit on Saturday.”

            “Normals don’t like to be around us,” Hideo replied. “One telepath is safe, maybe two, but not a whole campus. They’re too scared of us.”

            “You’ve never even met a normal! Who are you to talk?”

            “Many of the older students have normal parents. They don’t visit. Once, twice… if they even come at all.”

            “Mine are different, you’ll see!”

            Hideo shrugged and refused to argue. Andy remembered his mother’s attitude back at home.

            _Who would be proud to have a child in Psi Corps? I’d be terrified to have someone rooting around in my brain._

            With a sick feeling, he wondered if Hideo could be right. If his parents came to visit, they would see him dressed in his school uniform, gloves and all. What would they think? Would they even be able to look at him?

            “The teachers say normal parents don’t visit because they know that a telepath’s only true family is the Corps,” Hideo continued. “And it is, but I don’t think that’s why. I think they’re scared of us, and jealous.”

            Andy couldn’t believe it. There had to be some other reason. Either way, his were different. They wouldn’t abandon him in this strange school.

            The news that night covered a different kind of story.

_“A domestic dispute has sadly turned tragic in Cincinnati. A fifteen-year-old normal fell into a coma two days ago after an altercation with his sister, now identified as a telepath. The parents accuse the Corps of negligence for not identifying their daughter’s abilities sooner, and removing her from the family.”_

            The Corps broadcaster reminded the viewers that such accidents were extremely rare.

            “It can happen,” said Kit. “Even a P5 can make a mess of a normal.[14] To be good at psi combat requires a lot of training, but messing up a normal isn’t very hard. Perhaps she’d just got her psi, and didn’t know her own strength.”

            Andy thought of what Tess had told him. _We try so hard to reach children as quickly as possible, but every community is different. Sometimes we don’t get the call until someone’s injured or dead._

            He felt a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. He’d come within an inch of doing that to Patrick.

            “Maybe her brother attacked her,” said Deepa. “Maybe she panicked.”

            “If only the Corps had got there in time!” exclaimed Larissa.

            “I bet the parents framed her for it because she’s a telepath,” offered Henry, the freckle-faced boy, lying on his stomach with his head in his hands. “Mundanes lie. They always blame us for everything. Nothing changes.”

            “Scum,” he heard someone else mumble.

            “Hey!” shouted Andy. “Most normals don’t murder people, and most normals don’t hate telepaths, either! And my family are so-called ‘mundanes’, remember? They’re not scum! They’re good people!”

            Everyone looked at Andy with silent caution and wary eyes, as if collectively wondering whether the newcomer to their nest was really of their flock, or instead a dangerous cuckoo imposter, gloves and all. Andy instantly regretted his outburst, feeling as he had when he’d accidentally walked out of his room bare-handed.

            Naked. Vulnerable. Out of place.

            “You’re a telepath, Andy,” said Kit after a long pause. “Your family is the Corps.”

 

[1] Deadly Relations, p. 6. Here, since the school is saying it together, “cadre” has been changed to “school.”

[2] Deadly Relations, p. 47. See also p. 41 (Julia is wearing a school uniform in the hall at school).

[3] The Corps arranges and approves telepath marriages. Dark Genesis, p. 117, 122-123, 134-135 (Liz intentionally mischaracterizes the rules as "breeding regulations"), 218, Deadly Relations, p. 130-132, 176-180, 184-186. See also _Ship of Tears_. While all other laws that restrict telepaths in some fashion come from normals, the marriage rules are Corps regulations. Normal law does not prohibit telepaths and normals from intermarrying.  <em>Behind the Gloves</em> returns to the marriage regulations and the reasons for them later in the project.

[4] Deadly Relations, p. 6-7

[5] _Id._ , p. 199. The Corps used to teach that all telepaths are brothers and sisters, even the rogues. By 2253, the Corps was teaching children that rogue telepaths are the enemy.

[6] See Deadly Relations, p. 168-171, for a scene inside a Psi Corps medical center on Mars.

[7] Several episodes make mention of contracts with Psi Corps or written by Psi Corps, which implies that the Corps has its own legal department. See for example _Darkness Ascending_ , and see _Moments of Transition_ (power of attorney document, presumably drafted by the Corps, for Lyta’s remains). Also, a government agency of that size would need its own legal department. Telepaths are not, however, allowed to work as lawyers in normal society. See Dark Genesis, p. 32, Deadly Relations, p. 135.

[8] Inference. Department Sigma must hire scientists in order to carry out their many covert scientific, medical and military projects. See, for example, _Mind War_ , _Dust to Dust_.

[9] Deadly Relations, throughout.

[10] Pilot _(The Gathering)_ , _Mind War_ , Tim Dehass. “The Psi Corps and You!” /Babylon 5 #11/, Dark Genesis, p. 83.

[11] “The Psi Corps and You!” /Babylon 5 #11/

[12] See _Eyes_ for a mention of psychiatric diagnostic scans on normal patients. See Deadly Relations, p. 169 for a mention of psychiatric diagnostic scans on telepath patients. See _And Now A Word_ for mention of telepaths working in hospitals for normal children (at least in part to work with young telepaths who are just manifesting).

[13] Deadly Relations, throughout.

[14] Deadly Relations, p. 57


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See that footnote? It's even got hyperlinks. ^_^

            Though Andy’s classmates tried to include him in all their activities, his homesickness only deepened. The teachers told him that other students from normal households would be arriving soon, but for the moment he was alone with peers who’d been together since preschool - since the "cadres." He missed his friends back home, the way they’d used to be before he’d developed telepathy. Did they miss him at all? he wondered. Why hadn’t they written? Did their parents even allow them to contact him?

            His parents wrote and told him they could not visit on Saturday, after all. _Next week_ , they said.

            Then they said the week after that.

            Sometimes he cried himself to sleep at night, thinking about his family and friends, about his cousins, his neighbors, about his coach, even about kind Mr. O’Neil who’d saved him when Patrick and his friends had beat him up in the alley. He thought about Lucy, the feel of his old bed, about his favorite clothes, Christmas with his grandparents, vacations at the beach, the smells and tastes of his parents’ cooking.

            Logically, he knew it wasn’t anything he had done that had landed him here, but simply what he had become. He knew it was out of his control, but he felt guilty for it nonetheless, even as he knew his feelings were irrational. If he hadn’t developed telepathy, none of this would have happened. Some nights he lay in bed awake, unable to sleep. The situation was out of his control, but knowing that only made it worse.

_It’s all my fault. It’s all my fault._

            He learned to avert his eyes as he passed the art installations, massive works that hung in all the common rooms of the dorms. Even looking at the projects now made his heart skip, especially in the dark of night. If he stopped to stare, to ponder, a quiet, cold terror seized him, and he could almost hear the paint, glue, and ripped paper whispering silently in the moonlight that he would never be able to go home to his family, back to the normal world, not even when he graduated at nineteen – never.

            Somehow, since arriving at school, he had absorbed the deeper meaning of the artwork, as if through telepathic osmosis. _Family._ The ripped paper represented violence, he now knew – out in the wider world, telepaths were attacked regularly by normals, often for no reason at all.[1] The glue stood for healing – imperfect, messy – and the empty gloves honored telepaths who had been murdered, or killed in the line of duty protecting the Corps. All the remaining shapes in the figure were interconnected, overlapping – none could be removed without tearing the ones around it, or cutting the string, if not unraveling the entire project itself. And the red border, he knew – the red paint stood for blood.

            Was the life of telepaths truly framed on all sides by violence? he wondered. Or was that only how his classmates – sheltered within the walls of the school – understood the outside world?

 _Normals aren’t like that,_ he told himself.

            Yet salty tears fell on his gloves. And with each broken promise from his parents, he realized that something invisible now separated him from them, thin as black leather, but impossible to remove.

 

[1] See _The Corps is Mother the Corps is Father_ (Psi Cop intern goes alone into DownBelow and is randomly murdered), _Secrets of the Soul_ (Byron and another rogue telepath beaten up in DownBelow simply for being telepaths), _The Exercise of Vital Powers_ (a telepath named Constance is hired and then murdered by Mr. Wade (who works for Mr. Edgars)). See also Dark Genesis, p. 1, 14, 31 (massacres of 2115), and Final Reckoning, p. 242 (massacres of 2115), see [Josephine's story](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10293074/chapters/22772363); Dark Genesis p. 118-119, 157 (massacres of 2156); Dark Genesis p. 45 (popular comedian jokes on television about the violent murder of telepaths); Dark Genesis p. 48 (thirteen-year-old telepath boy “beaten within an inch of his life and left to die on the streets of Edinburgh,” four year old telepath girl “watched her whole family slaughtered execution style… shot, hacked with a machete, and left for dead. We found her under the corpse of her mother”), see [Stephen's story](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10324169/chapters/22823876); Deadly Relations, p. 48-50 and Final Reckoning, p. 243 (Bester gets beaten up by a normal on his first excursion off school grounds), see [Milla's story](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10358895/chapters/22887570); Deadly Relations, p. 94-105 (trafficking, rape and murder of telepath teenager Fatima Cristoban); Deadly Relations, p. 213-236 (serial killer on Beta colony who targets telepaths, and tortures them before killing them, while the normal police cover up for the killer because they think “[he’s] doing a fine job, ridding [their] planet of teeps” (p. 219). The killer’s MO for torturing his victims is even described as typical on p. 221.) See also Final Reckoning, p. 242-243 (the random murder of telepaths by normals still occurs every few weeks across the world, even in 2272).

This list is representative, not exhaustive.

Unfortunately, even the Centauri hate their own telepaths, too. Dark Genesis, p. 157: "Now, then. You wished to speak about telepaths. Nasty creatures, I think. Always at your back, you know, helping your enemies to plot your downfall. Still, a great house cannot hope to succeed without at least a few. And the women can do quite interesting things when they put their minds to it." [The Centauri ambassador] cackled, slapping Kevin's shoulder. "Did you hear what I said? Put their minds to it."


	4. Chapter 4

            Andy had never heard of any massacres in 2115, in Chicago or elsewhere.

            His history class stood in the circle of towering, polished stones, each carved with names. A small fountain stood in the very center of the ring of a man and a woman, weeping. The sun shone brightly on the students, oblivious to the somberness of the moment.

            Eighteen thousand telepaths, Teacher Jovanović reminded the group, had been brutally murdered in 2115, across Earth, and on the Moon colony[1] – riots, bombings, spacings.[2] The teacher pointed to one stone in particular.

            “This,” he said, “is the memorial to the victims of the Chicago Riots.[3] We cannot be certain that every person killed in the Riots was actually a telepath, because this was before mandatory registration,[4] but the majority did have the genetic marker. Some were probably latents who carried the gene.”

            As Andy reached out to touch the polished surface of the dark stone, he saw a hand reaching back, brushing fingertips with his own. He stood both outside the stone and inside it – in the present and in the past, all at once.

            Teacher Barbieri nodded. “Telepaths had existed since the beginning of time,” she said, “but in the mid to late 21st century, something began to change, and some people grew up much stronger than ever before. No one knew why, and that scared some of the normals. Others continued to stubbornly insist that we didn’t really exist,[5] that we were a hoax.”

            “Everything changed in 2115,” Teacher Jovanović continued. “The Chicago government was very corrupt, and the city had many problems. The mayor got a scapegoat when an article about telepaths was published in the New England Journal of Medicine,[6] and then a second article followed, identifying the genetic marker for telepathy.[7] The media exploded with fear – telepaths were dangerous, we were thieves and rapists, we could commit crimes and get away with it. The mayor blamed us for the corruption, claiming we were part of a secret conspiracy. People panicked. The police stole medical files and went after suspected telepaths. Riots went on all summer.”

            “See?” said Henry to Andy. “I told you they always blame us for everything, and nothing’s changed, but you didn’t believe me.”

            Andy watched the teacher carefully. There was something he wasn’t telling the group, Andy knew. It wasn’t the scapegoating part – that, Andy could feel, was completely true – but the older man was leaving something out. The moment went by quickly, almost as if it had been a slip, a suggestion placed into the back of his mind.

            Teacher Jovanović knew that at least half of the students had already developed telepathy. He knew they would be able to feel the omission, whatever it was. Surely someone as telepathically trained as Teacher Jovanović, Andy figured, would be able to hide a lie from his students if he wanted to.

            But he hadn’t. Why?

            The stones loomed ominously, and he fidgeted with his gloves in the wintry air.

            “As you all know,” Teacher Jovanović continued, “with the possible exception of our newcomer, Mr. Mora, Senator Lee Crawford of Texas courageously spoke up and offered a solution to the violence that summer – the registration of telepaths and the formation of the Metasensory Regulatory Authority, which became the predecessor to the Corps. In this way he stopped the violence against our people.”

            Andy had that eerie feeling again.

            Teacher Barbieri nodded. “Once the MRA was formed and telepaths began to come forward and be registered, the violence subsided. And then years later, after a second wave of terrible violence against telepaths,[8] Senator Crawford and President Robinson created the independently chartered Psi Corps[9] to provide a safe place for telepaths to live and work in peace in service to humanity, where we could reach our maximum potential. Senator Crawford became the Corps’ first director.”

            Andy looked over to his classmates to see if they had noticed.

 _I told you that the teachers sometimes say things they don’t believe,_ Henry ‘cast, his eyes meeting Andy’s.

_But what’s the part that’s not true?_

_Crawford. He caused the riots. Normals never made the Corps so we could do all that stuff about serving humanity – they made it to control us. But the teachers can’t say that._

_Why?_ Andy asked.

 _Why?_ Henry looked at him with shock. _Because the director would have their heads! They can’t speak badly about the Corps’ first director!_

            “Children were tested in school,” Teacher Barbieri was saying, “much like children are today, although back then they only tested for the gene itself.[10] Today we know that many people with the gene never develop telepathy. The genes are very, very recessive.”

            She went on to tell the group how telepaths, then as now, came from every ethnicity, religion, and nation. Without the Corps, she said, telepaths would have remained forever fragmented and scattered. They never would have abandoned their differences and come together under a common social order, in much the same way as the nations of the world put aside their differences and unified into a world-wide Earth Alliance with the arrival of the Centauri.[11] The Corps, she told the group, gave telepaths a path to progress, like the Earth Alliance represented progress for all of humanity.

 _It’s like what they say in the student handbook_ , Henry ‘cast, _in the chapter on history. Some of it’s true, but not all of it, because the Corps handbook was really written by normals. The teachers can’t say it aloud, but it you listen closely to their thoughts, you can figure it out. They want us to know, get it?_

            “And the founding of the Corps,” the teacher continued, “also strengthened the system by which telepath children from normal families could be identified quickly, before they were abandoned, abused or attacked by normals.”

            Andy thought of Patrick. He knew that lesson all too personally. That part, Andy knew, was certainly true.

            The sun continued to shine with callous cheeriness as the teachers directed the children’s attention to the large stone fountain. In the center, the figure of a man and woman sat, crying.

            Mother, Father, Andy realized.

            “This is the memorial to the babies,” Teacher Barbieri said. “When the genetic marker for telepathy was discovered, many mothers aborted their babies out of fear they might grow up to be telepaths.[12] Though there are many genes involved in telepathy,[13] the genetic marker discovered in 2115 is always passed from mother to baby.[14] There would be many thousands more telepaths today, perhaps even millions, were it not for all those who were murdered in these early years, most before they were born.”

            Andy saw Brittany wiping tears from her eyes.

            “Don’t cry,” the teacher told her, kneeling down. “There is no abortion in the Corps. And the Corps adopts all abandoned telepath babies and raises them,[15] like the Corps raised you and me. The Corps is Mother and Father to us all.”

            Brittany nodded, sniffling. “My mother left me at the Psi Corps office when I was a few days old,” she told the teacher. “I don’t know who she was, other than she was a telepath.”

            Andy suddenly felt very guilty for all his whining that his parents never came to visit. She had no parents at all, and she’d listened to all his complaining and had never once told him about her own past.

            He’d been a selfish jerk, again.

            The children entered a small building nearby, where they watched footage from 2115 on a huge screen. The first clip showed crowds of normals protesting, holding signs, demanding of then-Senator Crawford that he be “harder” on telepaths,[16] even that he round up all the telepaths and send them to death camps.[17] Then came footage of the 2115 Chicago Riots – mobs smashed windows, torched homes and shops, and beat suspected telepaths in the streets, all while the police stood by and watched. In one clip, city police forcibly escorted a family out of their home, to a fate unknown. A little boy about seven or eight years old looked at the camera, his face paralyzed with fear, then turned and followed his parents out of sight. The scene shifted to images of mass graves.[18]

            “But where were the Psi Cops to protect us?”[19] a boy asked, forgetting the historical context.

            “There were no Psi Cops then,” replied Teacher Jovanović, matter-of-factly.

            _No_ , Andy thought, watching the images of piles of bodies. _This couldn’t have happened right here in Chicago. Normals are good people. They’re not like that!_

            The images on the screen, however, told a different story.

*****

            A week passed, then another. Andy’s parents didn’t commit to a visit.

            “…I pledge to serve my comrades, my school, and the Corps. The Corps teaches, guides, and provides. The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. We are the children of the Corps.”

            As he finished the pledge with his classmates early one Saturday morning, he saw motion to his left, and turned his head. His parents stood in the distance, watching the school assembly.

            His heart skipped in his chest. _A surprise visit?!_

            Of course. It was almost Christmas.

            His joy at seeing them was drowned out by a new set of fears. He’d expected that when they came some day, they would see him in his uniform and gloves, but this was worse. The first thing they’d seen of his life at school was the pledge.

            Sensing Andy’s sudden spike of fear, the students near him looked left, to see what Andy was looking at. And less than a second later, the students around them also turned to look.

            _Oh my God, most of the school is staring at my parents!_

            He didn’t mean to bloop his feelings, but he couldn’t keep his thoughts to himself while panicking.

            His classmates’ reaction was entirely reasonable – Andy’s panic must have been palpable to everyone within line of sight, and it was only natural and reflexive to look for the source of alarm, or at least to turn your head when you could see everyone else doing so – but his parents wouldn’t understand that. They couldn’t “hear” emotions or thoughts. They would only see several hundred telepaths, clad in school uniforms, turning to look in near-unison, like a school of fish spotting a predator.

            His parents flinched, and took a step back.

            _Oh!_ someone near him thought. _Those are Andy’s parents!_

_Normals._

            The anomaly having been spotted, the students returned their attention back to the teachers, but the damage had been done.

            He remembered what Hideo had told him, weeks before. _Normals don’t like to be around us._ _One telepath is safe, maybe two, but not a whole campus. They’re too scared of us._

            Andy wanted to disappear in the crowd, camouflaged into invisibility. He hoped his parents couldn’t see him, but his gut told him that they already had.

            The teachers read that day’s announcements, but, rooted to the spot in the chill December air, Andy still couldn’t take his eyes off his parents. Was that a wrapped gift in his father’s hands? Was his mother crying?

            He saw his mother whisper something, and his father nod. He couldn’t make out their thoughts, but he had a very bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. They stood perfectly still until the announcements were over, and then, as the school dispersed, Andy saw his mother wiping away tears. They turned to leave. He watched them walk out the front gates, back to their car, gifts still in hand.

_The Corps is Mother and Father…_

_We are the children of the Corps…_

            Andy lingered behind in the courtyard, gaze fixed to the gate by which his parents had walked out of his life forever, until Kit and Henry came to take him to breakfast.

 

[1] Final Reckoning, p. 242 (“One hundred and fifty-eight years ago, the existence of telepaths was known to almost no one. One hundred and fifty-seven years ago, it became common knowledge thanks to an article in the New England Journal of Medicine. By the end of that year, eighteen thousand telepaths were dead. No war was declared by any government. They were killed one at a time, they were killed en masse and buried in pits, they were aborted when DNA testing revealed what they were as fetuses.” “Mr. Bester, I’m sure we all know the history.”)

[2] Dark Genesis, p. 31 (“She stared at him. “Vindicated? How can I feel vindicated by the deaths of more than ten thousand people? The massacre Wednesday in Shanxi? The bombing in Utah? The rioting in Chicago - the spacings in Armstrong?””)

[3] _Id._ The Chicago Riots took place in 2115, while mandatory telepath registration in the United States (and in other then-EA member states) was passed into law in 2117.

[4] Mandatory registration didn't become universal until the Corps was formed in 2156. See Dark Genesis, p. 119

[5] Dark Genesis, p. 2

[6] _Id._

[7] Dark Genesis, p. 33-34, 42

[8] Dark Genesis, p. 118-119, p. 157

[9] Dark Genesis, p. 119

[10] Dark Genesis, p. 60. The writing is inconsistent. If, as stated, 30% of telepaths aren’t detected by the test (which appears to be a saliva swab), then the MRA personnel are doing a genetic test and not a screening for telepathic ability, which would be exceptionally rare among first graders anyway. Many more people carry the genetic marker than are actually telepathic. The teacher nonetheless says “Only one in ten thousand tests out as a telepath. I doubt we’ll even find one here today,” confusing the incidence of Corps-level telepathy in the overall population (children + adults) as given in  _Mind War_ with the prevalence of the genetic marker, which is much higher.

[11] Dark Genesis, p. 118-119

[12] Final Reckoning, p. 242 (“They were killed one at a time, they were killed en masse and buried in pits, they were aborted when DNA testing revealed what they were as fetuses.”)

[13] Dark Genesis, p. 33 ("The telepathy gene?" "It's not so simple as that. No one has found any gene that seems to control for telepathy. It appears to be like intelligence, an emergent property found in many different genes. But the author of this paper did find a marker.")

[14] The genetics in canon is _really_ hand-wavey. See Dark Genesis, p. 33-34, and other places where the custom of telepath children taking their mother's surnames is referred to as taking the "mitochondrial" name, e.g. Deadly Relations, p. 215.

[15] Dark Genesis, p. 266-267. See also Deadly Relations, p. 21 The Corps flagship school in Geneva has a crèche in the hospital quad for care of infants, even though most telepaths don’t enter the Corps until they are older, even those with telepath parents.

[16] Dark Genesis, p. 49

[17] Dark Genesis, p. 28

[18] Final Reckoning, p. 242 (“They were killed one at a time, they were killed en masse and buried in pits, they were aborted when DNA testing revealed what they were as fetuses.”)

[19] See Peter Hellman,  Heroes: Tales from the Israeli Wars, p. 1


End file.
